Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005Get rights and content

Abstract

When donating to charitable causes, people do not value lives consistently. Money is often concentrated on a single victim even though more people would be helped, if resources were dispersed or spent protecting future victims. We examine the impact of deliberating about donation decisions on generosity. In a series of field experiments, we show that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has perverse effects: individuals give less to identifiable victims but do not increase giving to statistical victims, resulting in an overall reduction in caring and giving. Thus, it appears that, when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable victims but fail to generate sympathy toward statistical victims.

Section snippets

The identifiable victim effect

Prior research delineates two contributing factors behind the identifiable victim effect. First, when valuing life and other commodities with non-transparent market values, people show greater sensitivity to proportions than to absolute numbers of lives (Baron, 1997, Featherstonhaugh et al., 1997, Friedrich et al., 1999, Jenni and Loewenstein, 1997). For example, an event or calamity that causes 10 deaths within a very small community of 200 evokes a great amount of concern. Ten deaths out of

Overview of studies

Each of the four studies attempted to manipulate the level of analytic thought when people made decisions involving statistical and identifiable victims. Study 1 examines the impact on generosity toward statistical and identifiable victims of explicitly informing people about the identifiable victim effect. Study 2 rules out a potential artifactual explanation for the findings from Study 1. Study 3 attempts to teach the same lesson in an implicit, rather than explicit manner. By providing

Study 1

This study examined generosity toward an identifiable victim or statistical victims following an intervention that taught donors about the tendency for individuals to give more to identifiable victims than to statistical victims. We tested the effects of the intervention on giving behavior toward both presentations of victims.

Study 2

A limitation of the first study is a potential demand effect that we were made aware of after running it. Participants may have attempted to correct for their gut intentions about how much to give to please the researchers after learning about the bias. If this were true, one would expect participants to give more to statistical victims in addition to giving less to identifiable victims. However, it is possible that participants inferred that the bias was specifically located on donations to

Study 3

In Study 3, we attempt to debias identifiability in a more implicit manner. Rather than explicitly teaching participants about the discrepancy, we preceded a request for money for an identifiable victim with the simultaneous presentation of both victim statistics and a description of the identifiable victim.

Kogut and Ritov (2005b) gave some individuals an opportunity to give any amount or nothing to either or both a single, identified victim or a group of identified victims, while others only

Study 4

Unlike the previous studies in this paper, Study 4 does not incorporate an attempt to teach individuals about the identifiability effect, either explicitly or implicitly. Instead, we use an intervention designed to induce either a calculation-based or a feeling-based mode of thought. By doing so, we test whether it is possible to reverse the dominant reaction to each victim presentation. Importantly, this approach avoids the confound just discussed between modes of processing and the drop in

General discussion

Certain victims trigger a disproportionate level of sympathy. In the current paper, we find that debiasing, through deliberative thinking, reduces the discrepancy in giving to statistical and identifiable victims. We contend that deliberative thinking reduces the reliance on sympathy when evaluating an identifiable victim.

Our findings resonate with the ‘affect heuristic’ (Slovic et al., 2002) and the ‘feelings as information’ (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) frameworks. Consistent with the affect

Conclusion

In sum, our results demonstrate that sympathy for identifiable victims diminishes with deliberative thought, but remains consistently low for statistical victims. This pattern holds with various manipulations of deliberative thought, including explicit debiasing interventions, providing statistics, and priming an analytic mindset.

These findings support the more general notion that certain stimuli naturally evoke more affect than others and that cognitive deliberation can undermine outcomes that

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, a joint creation of the National Science Foundation (SBR-9521914) and Carnegie Mellon University. We thank Linda Babcock, Margaret Clark, and Jennifer Lerner for helpful comments and Jennifer Cerully and Nadia Tuma for research assistance.

References (27)

  • J. Friedrich et al.

    Psychophysical numbing: When lives are valued less as the lives at risk increase

    Journal of Consumer Psychology

    (1999)
  • T. Kogut et al.

    The singularity effect of identified victims in separate and joint evaluations

    Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

    (2005)
  • J. Baron

    Confusion of relative and absolute risk in valuation

    Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    (1997)
  • S. Chaiken et al.

    Dual-process theories in social psychology

    (1999)
  • A. Drolet et al.

    The Rationalizing effects of cognitive load on emotion-based trade-off avoidance

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (2004)
  • S. Epstein

    Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious

    American Psychologist

    (1994)
  • D. Featherstonhaugh et al.

    Insensitivity to the value of human life: A study of psychophysical numbing

    Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    (1997)
  • C.K. Hsee et al.

    Music, pandas, and muggers: On the affective psychology of value

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

    (2004)
  • K.E. Jenni et al.

    Explaining the “Identifiable Victim Effect

    Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    (1997)
  • D. Kahneman et al.

    Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment

  • P. Kennedy

    A guide to econometrics

    (1998)
  • T. Kogut et al.

    The “identified victim” effect: an identified group, or just a single individual?

    Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

    (2005)
  • G. Loewenstein et al.

    Statistical, identifiable, and iconic victims

  • Cited by (0)

    View full text